I decided to put some extra cooling on the CPU and see if I could get some more 'life' out of the thunderbird. There are several ways to achieve this:

Peltier-cooling - If you want extreme cooling a peltier can be what you’re looking for. Basically it is a very small element (!) that gets cooler way below zero. On the other hand it gets really hot on the other side of the element and you’ll have take away that heat with air-cooling or similar. My biggest boggle was not the CPU getting to hot but the graphic card and the chipset on the motherboard. Also I noted that the heat stayed in the case. So peltiers was not an option for me. The price for a peltier element is around 20 $. If you are interested in peltiers The Heatsink Guide have an article about it. The article can be found here.

Water-cooling - Here you put a small refrigerator into your case.  This technique is more expensive than the others (except if you strip your freezer on some stuff ;). If you want to know more overclockers.com have an FAQ about water-cooling with some links to suppliers. Click here to get directly to the FAQ. I'm not a fan of water versus sensitive electric peripherals, so I won't use this one either.

Air-cooling - To get rid of the heat in the case I ended up with deciding for fans. There are two problems with fans as I see it. The first is that your system never gets cooler than the temperature in the case/room. The other thing is that too many or “wrong” fans can be really noisy. Primary there is the size and the speed of the fan that determines if it’s going to be noisy or not. The bigger fan, the higher noise level and higher rotations per minute means higher level of noise. Another consideration is how much air the fan sucks or blows. This is measured in CFM, the higher the better. Please note that it will probably be noisier as the CFM rises. The good sides are that is safer than the peltier and the water-cooling solution.

Matt over at CardCooler.com immediately shipped two of his best Socket-A coolers towards me namely the:

• Silver Orb Cooler
• The Ice Cube Cooler

If anything, the names of these fans are cool huh ?

The Silver Orb
The first unit is the Thermaltake "Silver Orb" which is the same as the "Golden Orb" but with the updated socket A mounting system. The Silver Orb is actually a revised version of the "Golden Orb" to properly fit the AMD Thunderbird and Duron processors Socket A/462 rated to 1 GHz.

I knew that installing this baby would cause at least some problems since the fan is very width and there are several capacitors next to the mainboards Socket-A connector of the AKT7-RAID mainboard. 

Matt from Card Cooler told me that he has the same mainboard and that the The capacitors are a tight fit, but if you just bend them slightly away from the socket you should be able to get the orb to fit. Mine wasn't very difficult to get on and I didn't feel that I was risking my mainboard to do it, the capacitors don't have to be bent very far just a few millimeters. The most irritating part of this installation was actually securing and locking the fan to the socket, I had to use quite an amount of force. Ah, well ... once the thing is installed it doesn't has to be removed for a while huh ? 

The Silver Orb performed very well, in idle mode the CPU, overclocked at 800 MHz did an amazing 29 Degrees Celsius while in idle. When I utilized the CPU towards 100% for a while the maximum measured temperature was 46c, excellent a decrease of 13 Degrees. Excellent for a very quiet 18 dollar fan !